I find it useful when most of your work is wiring other command line tools together. When that's most of your work, shell scripting feels like it has the best affordances.
Anything that gets too fancy beyond this, with anything that resembles an algorithm or computation, you'll feel real pain :) Bash doesn't even support floating point!
A typical task in my day job is extracting metadata from and transcoding large AV archives, I always use a bash for this because I'm mainly stringing together tools like ffmpeg or sox, making directories, tempfiles, creating chesksum manifests, etc.
Also I typically do this on large CPU machines with many cores, I can parallelize operations in one line using xargs and a bash function. Doing stuff like this in python is actually a real pain in comparison.
There's a library for Node called Zx (https://github.com/google/zx) that provides a more shell-liked interface for Node.
I've been working on something in Python, inspired by Zx and Xonsh (https://xon.sh/), with syntax like this:
from pathlib import Path
from pyshell import Pipeline
args = ["123", "456"]
f = Path("out.txt")
with Pipeline() as p:
p.exec("a") | p.exec("b", *args) | p.exec("c", "x", "y") >> f
Is this something you'd use? It's slow going for me because it basically involves writing a compiler and I have approximately zero idea of what I'm doing. Knowing that other people would find it useful helps me stay motivated to keep working on it! Or if someone who theoretically is the primary audience doesn't find it useful, it might mean that I should spend my energy on other things.
Honestly I might be the wrong audience though, I've spent many years shell scripting and I find the flexibility of using the command line tools so great I choose to use it first despite the inadequacies of bash. I wonder if users with my point of view would ever be tempted away.
Also the shell is an interactive repl, which to me is where a lot of the power lies. The number of times I've asked a junior things like what the total duration of a set of audio files is, or the average length or something. They often come back with a python script or worse a jupyter notebook and pandas. The answer can also often be found by combining things like grep and awk in a few seconds once you've become acquainted with the tools, I guess I do try and demonstrate / preach this where I can.
But bc (and dc) does, and shell authors deemed this was good enough.
And that's part of the problem with the "Unix philosophy"
I had to do this once. It was so slow, I decided to use integers in kind of fixed-point math where I just multiply all the floats by 100 and work with ints.
zsh supports float though
If you prefer rigid adherence to standards, use awk.